Improving Performance of on Demand Multicast Routing by Deleting Lost Join Query Packets

A Mobile ad hoc network is a collection of wireless nodes that dynamically organize themselves to form a network without the need for any fixed infrastructure or centralized administration. The network topology dynamically changes frequently in an unpredictable manner since nodes are free to move. Support for multicasting is essential in such environment as it is considered to be an efficient way to deliver information from source nodes to many client nodes. A problem with multicast routing algorithms is their efficiency as their forwarding structure determines the overall network resource consumption makes them significantly less efficient than unicast routing algorithms. In this research, we improve the performance of the popular ODMRP multicast routing protocol by restricting the domain of join query packets, which have been lost. This is achieved by augmenting the join query packets with minimum extra information (one field), which denotes the number of the visited node from previous forwarding group. Simulation results show, that our mechanisms significantly reduce the control traffic and thus the overall latency and power consumption in the network.